The Portuguese Kitchen — Malasada, Sweet Bread and the Sausage

The Portuguese came to Hawaiʻi from Madeira and the Azores from 1878, recruited as plantation labour at a time when the sugar estates were looking beyond China and Japan for workers. They arrived as families, often on better terms than other contract labourers, and many served as luna, or supervisors, rather than as field hands. Their kitchen came with them: pork, tomatoes and chillies, and the oven-baked breads of the Atlantic islands.

The Portuguese table in Hawaiʻi rests on three things that the islands now treat as their own: the fried dough called malasada, the loaf called pão doce or sweet bread, and the spiced pork sausage. Each travelled in the hands of families who cooked what they knew with what the plantation camps could supply. Kysar, in Aloha Kitchen, counts them with Portuguese bean soup and cornbread among the dishes through which the Portuguese shaped the local food culture, and the same book gives malasadas and sweet bread rolls their own recipes. The bread is an enriched, lightly sweet dough, baked in the round, soft in the crumb and fine in the crust. Its place on the local table is wide: it is eaten plain, with butter, and toasted for breakfast, and it carries into the sandwich and the roll. The malasada is a yeast dough fried in oil and rolled in sugar, made without a hole and eaten hot. Where it lives or dies is the frying: oil at a steady heat, so that the dough colours evenly and cooks through without taking on grease. The sausage is the third thread. Seasoned with garlic, paprika or chilli and vinegar, it is a pork product of the Portuguese kitchen that the islands took into breakfast plates, fried rice and the bean soup. In that soup it sits with beans, tomato and vegetables, a dish that holds the Portuguese love of pork and tomato in a single pot. The sausage also joins the plate lunch and the egg dishes of the local table, where it stands beside rice rather than bread. When their contracts ended, some Portuguese opened bakeries and restaurants, which is how bread and fried dough passed from the household to the street and the shop. Many others became paniolo on the cattle ranches, working in the livestock trade that the vaqueros had begun in the 1830s.

The Portuguese table in Hawaiʻi is one of pork, tomato, garlic and chilli, set against the sweetness of the bread and the fried dough. A breakfast plate of sliced fried sausage with eggs and rice, a bowl of bean soup with the sausage and vegetables, and a loaf of sweet bread toasted and buttered are the forms in which it is eaten. The malasada is eaten hot from the oil, coated in sugar, and is not kept.